Pressure of Truth
Exposing the spin on all sides of the news.
Outlet profile

PBS NewsHour / Associated Press

U.S. center / institutional

Owned byPBS NewsHour is produced by WETA (Washington, D.C.) and WNET (New York) and distributed by PBS, a nonprofit network of member-owned local stations; AP is an independent, not-for-profit news cooperative owned by its member U.S. newspapers and broadcasters.
FundingPBS NewsHour relies on a mix of corporate underwriting, foundation grants, member-station dues, and — until 2025 — federal money via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (about 15% of its revenue); Congress clawed back CPB funding in July 2025 and CPB wound down operations, so that stream is gone. AP earns revenue by licensing text, photo, and video content to member outlets and other subscribers, plus a growing nonprofit arm (the AP Fund for Journalism) funded by foundations like Knight, Lilly Endowment, and MacArthur to support local newsrooms.
On the administrationmixed, with an adversarial edge toward AP specifically

Background

PBS NewsHour traces back to "The Robert MacNeil Report" (1975), later "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour," built around long-form, low-sensationalism nightly news. It has long been funded by a mix of CPB federal grants, corporate underwriters (e.g., major foundations and companies), and PBS member-station fees; the elimination of CPB funding in 2025, after a Trump-backed Congressional rescission of $1.1 billion in public-media money, forced CPB to wind down and cut a significant revenue source for PBS and NPR stations nationwide. The Associated Press, founded in 1846 by a group of New York newspapers, is one of the world's oldest and largest news cooperatives, owned by thousands of member newspapers and broadcasters rather than any single owner, and is best known for setting wire-service standards (the AP Stylebook) and supplying neutral, fast factual reporting used by outlets across the political spectrum. In February 2025, the Trump White House barred AP reporters from the press pool, Oval Office, and Air Force One after AP declined to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America" in its own style guide; AP sued, won a preliminary injunction, and the case remains contested through appeals as of 2026, illustrating real friction between the wire service and the administration. Both organizations have reputations for traditional, sourced, non-opinion journalism and are frequently cited as credibility benchmarks by media-bias raters, though critics on the right have long characterized public broadcasting as institutionally left-leaning, a claim PBS and AP dispute.

Sources

  1. Congress rolls back $9 billion in public media funding and foreign aid
  2. Corporation for Public Broadcasting says it will shut down after Congress cut money
  3. PBS isn't shutting down. Loss of federal funding will still have a significant impact
  4. Judge orders White House to lift restrictions on Associated Press over use of Gulf of Mexico
  5. AP Will Remain Banned From White House Press Pool Following "Gulf of Mexico" Dispute
  6. The Associated Press to launch sister organization to fundraise for state, local news

Profile compiled 2026-10-02; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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